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Talk:Wand of wishing
Wand of wishing in shops In a few places on the wiki, advice is given on how to dispatch the shopkeeper if a wand of wishing is found in a shop before one can pay for it. The advice is to either wish for a wand of death to kill the shopkeeper (which has a luck penalty if not chaotic, plus telepathy loss if someone was lucky enough to eat a floating eye corpse) or to wish for a blessed figurine of an archon. If I was in that situation, my course of action would be to instead wish for a blessed figurine of a purple worm. Purple worms have a digestion attack that is certainly enough to take out a shopkeeper. More importantly, they are much safer to wish for than an Archon because a hostile purple worm can be easily defeated by a wand of digging, while an archon is certain death to a character that doesn't even have enough gold to buy a wand of wishing. Additionally, likely not an issue so early in the game, but an Archon is given a guaranteed artifact, which could be bad for someone planning to wish for artifacts with the wand. A purple worm (or any strong pet) is also, in my opinion, significantly more useful than a limited-use wand of death. I don't want to change the relevant pages without hearing what other people think; a pet archon is obviously more useful than a purple worm, and this is simply my opinion on the matter and far from expert advice. Actually, why isn't the most obvious solution of leaving the wand alone and trying to find enough gold to simply buy it ever mentioned? Gold really isn't that rare, and a wand of wishing shouldn't ever cost more than 1000 zm for an extremely ugly character. Qazmlpok 22:41, September 13, 2009 (UTC) Obviously it's because you might not live long enough to get that much gold. 23:52, September 13, 2009 (UTC) : I, too, have always wondered for whom that is good advice. The two times I encountered a wand of wishing in a shop, I simply got my pet to steal it, heavily credit-cloning in the process. In one case, I had to wander about a few steps to find a pet, some gold, or high-price junk. In the end that gave me far better uses for the wand, such as the Master Key of Thievery and a magic marker (marker -> charging, marker -> genocide -> silver scale mail, marker -> uncurse scroll -> (un)holy water, ...). : My guess what happened is a impatient type of person found out how to have the wand right away. I think this particular piece of advice should be featured far less prominently, but not removed entirely, because it could be useful for speed ascenders or (sic) impatient people. -Tjr 16:33, September 14, 2009 (UTC) SLASH'EM weirdness A couple of strange things I found looking through the source code for SLASH'EM: *Wands of wishing will have already been recharged half the time, from SLASH'EM 0.0.7E7F2/mkobj.c#line679, we have: 679. case WAND_CLASS: 680. if(otmp->otyp WAN_WISHING) { 681. otmp->spe = rnd(3); 682. #ifdef INVISIBLE_OBJECTS 683. if (Is_stronghold(&u.uz)) otmp->oinvis = 1; 684. #endif 685. if(!rn2(2)) otmp->recharged = 1; 686. } It seems the first statement should always make the Castle wand invisible, which in my experience is the case, and the second should make any wand of wishing be recharged half the time. That, I can't honestly say I can recall ever having had happen, so perhaps I'm reading this wrong? Has anyone else found a wand of wishing that had already been recharged, outside of a bones pile? The other strange thing I found relates to the Black Market, at SLASH'EM 0.0.7E7F2/shknam.c#line710: 710. /* prevent wishing abuse */ 711. if (typ WAN_WISHING) { 712. otmp->spe = 0; 713. otmp->recharged = 1; 714. } 715. if (typ MAGIC_LAMP) { 716. otmp->spe = 0; 717. } Again, I may be reading this wrong, but it seems that any wand of wishing in the Black Market would be a wand of wishing (1:0), and I don't know what it does to magic lamps there. Again, I'm fairly certain I've found charged, non-recharged wands of wishing in Sam's shop, so maybe I'm reading this wrong? I have no idea how to test either of these, short of repeatedly abusing explore mode or wizard mode, which perhaps is what needs to be done. Or perhaps I'm totally misreading all this code; if so, please tell me. -Ion frigate 06:11, June 29, 2010 (UTC)